Comments on: BBC Column: Are we naturally good or bad?http://mindhacks.com/2013/01/23/bbc-column-are-we-naturally-good-or-bad/
Neuroscience and psychology news and views.Sun, 02 Aug 2015 12:59:22 +0000hourly1http://wordpress.com/By: Nevin Blumerhttp://mindhacks.com/2013/01/23/bbc-column-are-we-naturally-good-or-bad/#comment-387520
Mon, 20 Jul 2015 06:18:09 +0000http://mindhacks.com/?p=25589#comment-387520The difficulty is determining whether the desire for successful outcome of the uphill shape’s climb emanates from empathy for it or an innate preference for order over disorder (by the term order I mean a logical outcome of effort). Already a baby has a sense of cause and effect in motion, and we might expect it to feel distress or surprise at any hindering effect. True, there are two competing motivations but the uphill journey starts the motion, therefore one might assume it is the baby’s first and stubbornly fixed referent to gauge cause and effect. In that sense the upward motion is expected to create order while the downward push signifies disorder (ie the effort is wasted by the sudden thwarting of the uphill journey). Is the infant merely preferring order to disorder in the same way that it might cry when a repetitive movement ceases? If a raindrop aimed at a cup was thwarted by a person moving it away at the last moment, might it result in a similar reaction? It might let an ant crawl to the top of mound before deciding to crush it.
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Mon, 04 Feb 2013 15:49:18 +0000http://mindhacks.com/?p=25589#comment-49601Andras, thanks for your alternative facilitating/hindering hypothesis. You appropriately suggest that our concepts are blurry. Morality is certainly blurry. Same for good/bad. I think that is because we fail in reducing them to a set of rules, no matter how general or how many. But what is being facilitated or hindered? It seems we are right back into the blurry territory when we ask that and still have to deal with whether it is innate or not.

Using the analogy of sprout and a oak tree, the sprout has all the structure and characteristics of a mature oak but depending on where it grows will determine what it will look like in another 50 years. We can say the mature oak is innate in the sprout because in spite of what it looks like in 50 years it still has all the internal structures that the mature oak has. The structure is innate. A question to me is how much the neurological structure of humans and its developmental changes during maturation are fixed from innate characteristics and how much are plastic that are so profound that they divide mature humanity into different behavioral species. We know that all prior attempts at creating the “new man” from political or religious pressures have failed. Looking back over the crude attempts over the last 2,500 years shows us how cruel those attempts were. It may be that there is no “new man” to create. Humans are humans and nothing more? If so, we should at least understand what we are instead of what we “should” be.

Building an inventory of what social skills are innate would help us construct a model of how social life works. In addition to the already demonstrated sense of fairness, I hypothesize there is a sense of hierarchy or ranking which might even be related to the inherent mathematical sense of inequalities that Stanislas Dehaene wrote about in “The Number Sense”. Whether it is vague or not I would include a sense of self. Is there a short list? That would depend, it seems to me, on how we conceptualize the innate social skills. That is why I mentioned the sense of self in earlier posts, to demonstrate that any sense probably can be subdivided. And what we cannot demonstrate as innate should we conclude are learned? Or are there emergent skills that that can never clearly be attributed to any one source but are a combination of experience with those derived from neurological maturation? For example, our strategies for coping with the world probably falls into that indistinct area and would help explain the development of the variety of personalities.

]]>By: andrashttp://mindhacks.com/2013/01/23/bbc-column-are-we-naturally-good-or-bad/#comment-49519
Mon, 04 Feb 2013 08:36:34 +0000http://mindhacks.com/?p=25589#comment-49519Interesting comments. Another way to look at it is that infants have an early, not necessary innate, model of how (social) life works. In this model facilitating can simply be more probable than hindering. We do not necessary need more complex or, let me say blurry, concepts like self or morality for our explanation. On the other hand, this early model can serve as one of the building stones of self and morality.
]]>By: ameliehttp://mindhacks.com/2013/01/23/bbc-column-are-we-naturally-good-or-bad/#comment-48594
Mon, 28 Jan 2013 20:27:46 +0000http://mindhacks.com/?p=25589#comment-48594I’m guessing English is not their first language so maybe we should cut them some slack.
]]>By: Mason Kelseyhttp://mindhacks.com/2013/01/23/bbc-column-are-we-naturally-good-or-bad/#comment-48569
Mon, 28 Jan 2013 17:53:02 +0000http://mindhacks.com/?p=25589#comment-48569Your post, Sanjeeb, perplexes me. Here is a partial list of terms you use: Basin [human] nature, surprises, supposed to run, happy ending, shocked, rebellion, feeling lucky, among others. Each person reading what you wrote will probably put their own interpretation on those words or phrases all the while assuming everyone else is interpreting them the same way. I know that I have made that error. That means that I don’t have a clue as to what you really said as I have no idea what those terms mean to you. Our common language is like a fog that obscures as much as it illuminates. Sharing the same words is not sharing the same meanings. And our different life experiences pull us in different directions. You expect infants to rebel while I might think they are simply communicating their discomfort with diaper rash? Don’t you think a more precise description is useful? If so, what do you think is an appropriate direction to take there?
]]>By: Sanjeeb Khanalhttp://mindhacks.com/2013/01/23/bbc-column-are-we-naturally-good-or-bad/#comment-48456
Mon, 28 Jan 2013 07:56:34 +0000http://mindhacks.com/?p=25589#comment-48456Basic nature of human lies in amusement caused by surprises. Surprises can be good as well as bad. However they are unusual, not normal. Good surprises have no attraction because that;s how the world is supposed to run. Most babies are shown a good world by adults, where everything has a happy ending. However, babies get shocked, when the world that they see goes in utterly different way, unlike the fairy tales of adults. Anything that is out of the system contains rebellion. Rebellion is attractive. In group, people feel safe by seeing others in trouble, just to satisfy one self that he/she is not in danger and glorify one’s own fortune by being able to see the worst that could happen and feeling lucky not to have experienced such bitter moments.
]]>By: Mason Kelseyhttp://mindhacks.com/2013/01/23/bbc-column-are-we-naturally-good-or-bad/#comment-48055
Fri, 25 Jan 2013 13:26:22 +0000http://mindhacks.com/?p=25589#comment-48055Observer, an intention of reward and punishment appear to be learned behaviors rather than innate because they conjoin what we presume to be innate senses or social skills with methods of dealing with events unique to a culture. Perhaps you meant something more along the lines of fight or flight reactions, which are, I assume, also innate. But is the conjoining of two innate behaviors also innate? It is not clear. Fight/flight reaction in an immobile infant would probably be expressed as distress, and, if so, might be unethical.
]]>By: Observerhttp://mindhacks.com/2013/01/23/bbc-column-are-we-naturally-good-or-bad/#comment-48043
Fri, 25 Jan 2013 12:29:07 +0000http://mindhacks.com/?p=25589#comment-48043The experiment as it’s described doesn’t convey much at all. Even if infants were evil, they would naturally be inclined to approach the “good” shape since it’s less likely to hurt them.

A good experiment would consider whether they would, for example, want to reward or punish the shapes. And more importantly perhaps, gauge their reaction when their own interest is at stake.

]]>By: Mason Kelseyhttp://mindhacks.com/2013/01/23/bbc-column-are-we-naturally-good-or-bad/#comment-47835
Thu, 24 Jan 2013 04:47:59 +0000http://mindhacks.com/?p=25589#comment-47835I see no sense in attempting to attribute a sense of self to a single cell organism where a biochemical action is capable of explaining all that happens there. I wouldn’t think it appropriate to attribute a self to Eric Kandel’s Marine Snail. I recognize that the self is something that can exist on a continuum and that as animals increase their mental capability that sense of self would naturally expand in its functions. But for this discussion it probably is wise to limit ourselves to the human sense of self, even though I personally would agree with my two cats that they also have a sense of self and very different personalities from each other.

We can look at the self and see what environmental or mental problem it solves and that would enable us to see it as part of the continuing evolution of the human mind. For example, I hypothesize that the one of the self’s main functions is to evaluate risk and sound alarms if any risk increases in the environment. So we can look at the menagerie of the different types of senses of selves in humans, and we can hypothesize what their functions are and thus how would their presence improve our probability of survival. I do hesitate to claim there are “levels” of selves, only that some appear more primitive than others. I did not mean to imply that a sense of agency and ownership is at some lower level than the other senses of self, but you could infer that they might have developed at an earlier period in animal evolution and in neonatal development. I’m sure my cats have a sense of agency and ownership and probably risk also. At least when I observe them engage with a neighbor’s cat I have to restrain myself in anthropomorphizing that they are calculating their risks and chances leading up to a cat fight. But, by golly, it sure seems that is happening. And I do the same thing with observing other humans and thinking I can guess what is going on in their heads as they try to figure out the best way to approach problems. But anthropomorphizing humans can be as dangerous as anthropomorphizing other animals.

You can see this topic can balloon into distant tangents. As interesting as they are, let’s return to the original topic of Mind Hacks. Is our sense of good and bad innate? If so, what is the evidence? And what relationship does it have to any other innate social skills we might have. And, we can add, what is having this sense of good and bad? Is it our sense of self? I think it has a lot to do with our menagerie of senses of self at least some of them.

Finally, a wonderful collection of essays on the self was edited by Shaun Gallagher and Jonathan Shear, “Models of the Self” (1999). And Dan Zahavi’s “Subjectivity and Selfhood” (2008). Great reading.

]]>By: neurotic apehttp://mindhacks.com/2013/01/23/bbc-column-are-we-naturally-good-or-bad/#comment-47813
Wed, 23 Jan 2013 23:58:09 +0000http://mindhacks.com/?p=25589#comment-47813Mason, as you indicate the “sense” of self is a complex subject with many different levels. The fact is that we have yet to truly nail down what this sense is. We understand parts of it, but the whole is still quite a mystery.
I have actually been pondering this for a few weeks now. Does a single celled organism have a “sense” of self? I am not speaking of self awareness but more of motivation to act to benefit the “self”. Quite a few appear to. If they do, do we acquire our sense of self when the sperm joins the egg? Again not self awareness but motivation towards a goal. As cells are added to “us” do we then add a deeper sense of self to the core or was it all there stored away in our DNA? Difficult questions to answer, but I feel very worthwhile questions to ask.
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